


All Alone in the Moonlight: A Forensic Look at the Secret Life of Rose Lalonde

by OvaltineAuthoress



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Ladystuck, Ladystuck 2015
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-07
Updated: 2015-01-28
Packaged: 2018-03-09 10:43:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 3,977
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3246740
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OvaltineAuthoress/pseuds/OvaltineAuthoress
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A slew of objects is spread out before you. Each of them are significant in their own special way, and all of them have one shining element in common.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Inventory

**Author's Note:**

  * For [cassiopite](https://archiveofourown.org/users/cassiopite/gifts).



> Written for Ladystuck 2015. Sorry this was so horrendously late. I was over ambitious and then life kicked me in the shin and took my lunch money. Hopefully it was worth the wait. 
> 
> Here's a short listening mix I put together to go with the piece:
> 
> http://8tracks.com/walkinganddead/all-alone-in-the-moonlight-a-forensic-look-at-the-secret-life-of-rose-lalonde

 

 

A slew of objects are spread out before you, all of them significant in their own special way, and all of them with one shining element in common. 

Each one contains a chapter of a chapter in a story larger than you could have possibly conceived. 

Outside killer zombie skeletons roam your funky neon planet, and your three friends are nowhere to be found. So you pour yourself a vodka tonic and descend into the bowels of her house, of your house, and decide to spend this lonely afternoon waltzing in a drunken daze through someone else's memories.

 

 

**> Click on Item A **


	2. Item A

 

 

It’s a scarf. Hand knitted from the looks of it, but you can hardly tell the stitches are so fine.

You’ve spent plenty of nights this month watching Sherlock Holmes movies and mini-dramas snuggled up against Jane in a pile of blankets, yarn, and misplaced spoons with Fefeta curling around the ceiling lamp while you took turns tossing her fish cookies. If you learned anything from those hours and hours of false gay tension with someone shouting “elementary dear Watson!” every couple of minutes, it was that even this seemingly innocent scarf can tell you things about her.

 It’s traveled through space and time and three dimensions to be here with you today, warming your neck. You’re astounded there’s not one inch of fraying. She was meticulous, you think to yourself. You imagine her sitting out on the deck in a rocking chair like one of those pioneer grannies, knitting away with furious efficiency. You imagine her holding the scarf up to the light and inspecting it with sharp eyes for mistakes. She must have been one hell of a perfectionist.

 You too tried your hand at knitting once, but quickly abandoned the practice. After waking up wasted and covered in yarn it was made apparent you aren’t really the crafty type.

You handle the scarf gently before closing your eyes and pressing it against your face. When it first arrived it smelled like lavender and pine and rainy afternoons, maybe just the slightest hint of ecto-goop. Now it smells like minty bubblegum, cinnamon, alcohol, and blood. How quickly her smell was assimilated into your own, you think, setting it down. How quickly the damn scarf became yours and not hers.

 You sigh and turn to the next item.

 

**> Click on Item B**


	3. Item B

  

Well look at this little cutie, curled up on the floor with a ball of yarn while he gets his nap on. He’s one of many darling Frigglish clones that you think might be constructing a nest in the basement. This one you’re pretty sure Jane named Horace Dorrington, or it might be the one Dirk named Pen McPhallus. You really should get on labeling them. It’s a good thing you’re not a lonely drunk single girl or some might deign to call you a crazy cat lady. Ha ha ha ha.

Either way, this lil’ sucker is being as cute as he can be. He inflates and deflates like a fuzzy balloon every time he breathes in and out, and he opens one of his adorable mutant eyes to peak out at you and meow.

You reach over and scratch his head and smile as he purrs. You and Frigglish used to do this, before he was crushed by Jane’s ridiculously overweight joke book. It sure was awesome of you to kill your mom’s cat, you fucking asshole. It wouldn’t have happened if you hadn’t appearified him to your timeline in the first place. Who the fuck does that? Steals a little kid’s favorite cat. You apparently.

You knew he missed her, the way he’d paw around the house meowing forlornly. You loved him, sure, but you weren’t his owner. Maybe it was that desire to share something with her. After all you’d always had it in your head that you’d return him to her someday.

You had it all planned out. When the game did its magic and resurrected her the way you thought it would, she’d come up blinking and confused and you’d be there holding sweet little Frigglish and you’d say something smooth like “Were you looking for this mom?” and Mom would smile and say something smooth back like “I was looking for the both of you,” and then you’d hug and BAM. Roll credits. Instead you dropped a book on the cat and had to send him back flatter than a pancake.

Poor sweet Frigglish.

You’re the worst daughter, it is you.

  

 ** > Click on Item C** 


	4. Item C

 

It’s a pair of knitting needles, or rather _the_ pair of knitting needles. Four hundred some odd years in the making and they are still quality as fuck. The legends told that your mother had harvested these babies out of the belly of a whale and fined them to a point with nothing but a machete and her own teeth. You’re pretty sure they’re just a standard pair of plastic craft store knitting needles though, unless Mom carved that “made in China” in to them to fool people. Honestly that sounds like a thing she’d probably do.

She had these on her the day she was killed. These were the needles she’d shoved into the eyeballs of that tyrannical monster High Chaplain Guy Fieri. When he’d drowned in the blood of his own fallen victims, it had been her stylish stilettos poking a hole in his abdomen, and these kick ass knitting needles were the last thing he ever saw.

You imagine she did it with the same dexterity she would have spent knitting that scarf. Effortless swift perfection as she rode him like the bitch pony he was all the way to the bottom of Niagara Falls. Just the thought of it is too fucking awesome for words.

“Our parents were real goddamn fucking heroes, y’know?” you once told Dirk. You were ten and had recently discovered the exotic thrill of filling your pesterlogs with salty sailor talk.   
“I guess,” he responded. “I’m glad they didn’t take the bullshit of their time lying down, but its weird thinking about them like that.”  
“How do you motherfucking mean?” you’d asked.   
It had taken him a full five minutes to respond. “At the risk of sounding like a maligned Disney protagonist, something about it just makes me feel sort of overcooked, if that makes sense. It’s a lot to live up to, and when you're thinking about them in that context, I guess you just forget that they were human.”  
“Well nobody said we had to fucking live up to them,”  
“Like a vengeful Spaniard in an over-quoted film, I ponder if that word is what you mean, or just what you think you mean,” he’d said. “But jokes aside, when you think about them like that, they just don’t feel real.”

You didn’t understand what he meant back then, and in some ways you still don’t. Dirk has always seen his brother as a shadow, as a towering legend to climb over and surpass. You highly doubt he keeps his brother’s old t-shirts in a box and pulls them out to smell them every now and again the way you’re doing now. His brother was never anything to him except a phantom at the end of a staircase daring him to ascend.

“He’s your dad kinda, right?” you’d asked. “Why do you call him Bro?”  
“My genetic material was forged from him sure, but he’s not my dad,” he’d said. “We just share DNA. If he’d been my dad, I’d call him dad, but he wasn’t, so he’s Bro. Bro feels better anyway.”  
“If it makes you happy,” you’d said.   
“Why do you call her Mom?” he’d asked.   
  
Because that’s what you wanted her to be.

There are time when you understand the feeling though; how and why Dirk can be so cold about his own flesh and blood. You read the stories of the legend who was your mother, the acclaimed writer, political activist, revolutionary, who came farther than anyone else to saving mankind, and you don’t know what to do with that. You don’t know how to feel about a looming hero who's more statue than human. What could someone like that see in someone like you?

 None of that ever made the difference to you. You just wanted a mom.

 

**> Click on Item D**


	5. Item D

 

Item D is a videocassette tape. Wow is this thing a dinosaur, even Jake “Swellorama” English would agree. Leave it to the Condesce to record something so important on such an obsolete piece of crap, the diabolical bitch. Lucky for you, the basement monitor came equipped with a VCR. Take that alien conqueror’s and modernity. Earth’s victory is a bittersweet one.

You wonder if you should pop the tape in. You’ve already seen it once before, and it was an upsetting experience to say the least. You’d hid it down here for rainy occasions when you were sad and could maybe stand to watch it all the way through. You’re feeling depressed and sentimental, which is the appropriate mood to be in. The tape is important after all.

Dirk was the one who uncovered it floating around in the sunken remains of what was a city library. He repaired the water damage and sent it to you with your stinkin’ VCR. When you told him what was on it the most you got was an “I figured.” He never watched it himself, and you don’t blame him for it.

You push it into the VCR and switch the monitor on. There’s a few seconds of grainy static before the image comes through.

"ALTERNIAN ARCHIVE WARNING NOTICE: THE FOLLOWING HISTORICAL EVIDENCE CANNOT BE REPRODUCED OR REDISTRIBUTED UNLAWFULLY. VIOLATORS WILL BE GUTTED, STABBED, HUNG, AND THEN LAUNCHED INTO THE COLD VACUUM OF SPACE, BY ORDER OF HER IMPERIOUS CONDESCENSION."

You roll your eyes and fast forward through the obligatory “You Wouldn’t Steal a High Blood’s Motor Pod,” PSA that seems to kick off all of these Troll films, before the recording starts in earnest.

Two figures, a man and a woman, are kneeling, a pair of Drones holding their heads down. Behind them is the backdrop of a flooded city. Somewhere off screen a deep feminine voice bellows, “read them their charges.”

One of the drones comically clears its throat before reciting a list of transgressions. “Human subordinates Dave Strider and Rose Lalonde stand accused of several counts of off caste culling, plotted insubordination, treason, anarchy, attempted murder of Her Imperious Condescension herself, and property damage. How do you plead?”

Dirk’s brother, Dave, starts laughing hysterically. “Fuck if I know man, all I set out to do was draw some dick pics in her highness’s back yard. Anarchy is one hell of a slippery slope.” His laugh echoes in the dead silence as neither the drones nor Her Condescension is amused. His face is black and blue, and there’s blood pouring from his abdomen, his nostrils, his ears, pretty much everywhere. He’s laughing so hard you can see his broken teeth and it’s obvious he’s completely petrified. “I’ve actually prepared a rap about my descent into revolutionary. I am an Artist after all over here, so let me entertain you with one last verse if you’ll allow me to—“ he’s cut off by one of the drones slamming his head against the ground. There’s a cracking sound, and he’s not getting up from that anytime soon, but he’s still snickering.

The drone turns to your mother, and you feel something well up in your throat. “How do you plead?” it asks her. Your mother doesn’t turn her head, doesn’t acknowledge the question, doesn’t say a word. There’s a grotesque slash across her face, and her eyes are too black and swollen to even open all the way, yet somehow she’s still elegant, and domineering. Her silence is as disconcerting as Strider’s laughter.

“Just execute us,” Dave gasps through his laughs. “Get this ridiculous shit show on the road.”

The camera shakes a little as the enormity of the Condescension herself, decked out to the nines in all her alien splendor steps into the shot. The drones move aside. There’s a snapping and sparking on the screen you recognize as psiioniics as she holds the two of them still.

“Any last words?” she asks.

Dave manages to catch his breath as he puts on a serious face. “Yes I have some. There is something I’ve always wanted to say to you psychotic fish queen, and do you know what that is?”

There’s a silence as she regards him before asking, “What?”  
  
“Chicken butt.”  
  
There’s a sickening “shink” sound as her trident goes right through his neck. He chokes and sputters, but goes silent when she twists her giant fork and snaps his neck in two pieces. You want to close your eyes watching it, but instead you keep them glued to the screen. The Condescension steps on his head to yank her fork free before turning to your mother.

“And you Lalonde?” she says pointing the bloody trident at your mother.

Your mother doesn’t say anything. She looks up at the Condesce weakly, with a small grin on her face.

Something passes between them, and the Condesce sniffs. "Suit yourself." She rams the trident through your mother’s eyes. The last thing your mother ever saw.

You turn off the monitor before she gets the chance to fall backwards.

 

**> Click on Item E **


	6. Item E

 

 Item E is a mint condition bottle of _“Pinky and the Drain”_ Bubblegum Vodka. Definitely the pinkest star in your mother’s seemingly endless liquor cabinet. You’ve been saving it for a particular occasion, but fuck it, now seems appropriate enough with it sitting here on the floor while you shudder in misery. You crank it open and get cracking on forgetting everything.

Vodka, bubblegum pink or not, leaves a nasty burning taste in your mouth that never seems to go away. But then you’re not really drinking this shit because it tastes like one of Jane’s birthday cakes. After 400 years you might as well be drinking lighter fluid.

You can’t really remember the first time you decided to unlock to the liquor cabinet and try some of the crusty shit your mom had inside. There was never a big culminating moment where it happened like in those 90’s drug PSAs Dirk would sometimes email you for shits and giggles. Your sexy Soviet cousin did not stuff the vodka into your sandwich causing a three second downward spiral of trying to fly off the roof. You did not break into tears while singing “I’m so excited!” If anything you probably barfed in the bathtub and then woke up the next morning with a killer migraine.

Your mother had a well-publicized drinking problem early on her career when the public had just caught wind of her spark. You imagine she was young and confused, angrily trying to make sense of her visions of the future, and drowning out the screams of humanity with whatever she could find. There’d been a few attempts on her part to go seek therapy, but she somehow always seemed to out therapist the therapists. Rehab was a revolving door. She’d walk in shit faced and delusional and walk out head held high chugging a bottle of _“_ _Macabrenet.”_ When asked about it, temperate nurses who’d encountered your mother would wipe their brow, pull a wine cooler out from under their scrubs and say, “that woman is a witch.”

You supposed you thought she was being cool. You’d live streamed shitty action flicks with Jake, and who in those things was cooler than the tough of nails lady who could down a table of shots and drunkenly flip off the bar as she strode out into the world, and there were no arguments to be had about the kind of stone cold badass your mother was. That’s what it was with you and her, you told yourself every time you unscrewed a bottle.

 _“No one said we had to live up to them,”_ was what you’d told Dirk. Everywhere he looked he was plagued by his brother’s shadow. He looked in the mirror and saw his brother’s face looking back at him mockingly. It made Dirk hate his own skin. Somehow for you the situation was completely opposite, but the outcome the same.

Her shadow never lingered. It hid in the corners of your vision, a flash by the window, a flicker of the light, the haunting feeling of ghosts swirling beneath you. You wanted to live in that shadow, to wrap yourself up in her and everything she was. You wanted to touch her, you wanted to feel her arms around you, and wanted to hear her say, “I love you.” You wished you could be plagued by her the way Dirk was, as opposed to just abandoned. You didn’t see her when you looked in the mirror. She was nothing but fragments and echoes scattered around the house.

The vodka burns through you and you’re happy to take a backseat in your own brain. You pull up your mother’s audio book on your phone, pick up Horace McPhallus and lay down on the couch while listening to her words read to you by a cool hollow voice.

_“It was in those moments Zazzerpan realized the error of his logic. How could he have been so blind to suppose an enigma could take any real form? How could he have suspected to definitively know Calmasis as anything?”_

 With every version of your mother you found; be it the revolutionary who almost toppled a genocidal regime, the severe untouchable author full of biting wit and snark, the six year old holding a clipboard and asking her kitten what it meant to speak into the void, the young woman waking up screaming and sitting alone drinking herself into oblivion, the thirteen year old God hurtling towards you through space and time, the witch who spoke cryptically of a future only she could see, or the crumpled bloody body being pulled off the Condesce’s spork, the less she felt like anything. The more you learned about her, the less you were able to find hiding in your own skin.

You’re about 75% sure you’ll be an orphan ‘til the day you die.

At least you and mom can share this.

 

**> Sleep**


	7. Item F

You wake up feeling sick and uneasily you try to sit up. Horace McPhallus has vanished, probably to the underground cat cave. Fefeta hovers over you, looking at you with concern. “I’m fine,” you tell her, trying to give her ghostly hand a squeeze. “I am peachy as pie.” Where the hell did you get that? Probably Jane.

You stand up and stretch, massaging the ache out of your muscles. You should go raid Janey’s house for an aspirin. She’d have something like that. You look down at the pile of items at your feet. There’s one more.

 

**> Click on Item F**

 

 

What is item F? You’re not sure you remember.

Slowly you lean down and pick it up.   
  
It’s one of her white journals, the one’s she’d write her story drafts in. You’ve found a million over the years but you are certain you’ve never seen this one before.

Written on the cover in neat purple print is your name. _Roxy._

Your heart clenches and you know you are on the threshold of something irreversible. Ever so carefully you run your fingers down the spine and observe it for damage, finger prints, anything. There’s none. It’s pristine. You press it to your face and it smells like paper, dust, pine, lilacs, and rainy afternoons.

 Your fingers shake as you open it.

 Written on the first page is a letter.

 

_Roxy,_

_I have no way of knowing when you will read this, so you must bear with my vague allusions and avoidance of spoilers. Despite what certain unnamed movie directors probably wrote in their autobiographies about me and my “Cassandra Complex,” I would like to be specific and direct with you. Unfortunately my hands are tied._

_The truth is Roxy there are many things in the future I do not have the ability to see. The future is a complicated beast and it holds many different variables and outcomes to account for. My understanding of it is merely one sun in an infinite sky of stars. I shed light where I am able, but the dark spots out number the light by far._

_I wanted to write you a letter with information about the future, a time map to guide you so to speak. Better yet I would have liked to have been able to guide you personally. As they say, fate is a cruel mistress. This journal is a pitiful substitute._

_We exist more than years apart, and you unfortunately reside deep in the void where I can’t see you. Because of this, I don’t know much about you or what your feelings towards me are. If you resent me for my absence, I do not blame you. In hindsight, perhaps there was more that I could have done to bridge our gap. I will promise you however that while my life is coming to an end, and your life has years and years to begin, there will be a place and time somewhere in our future where our timelines will meet. I may not be able to see it in my small understanding of the future, but I have unyielding faith that such events will come to pass. In the interim, while you are absent from me, you are never absent from your friends and those who love you. Ectobiology relations aside, they are family as well._

_And finally, Roxy, darling, who ever you turn out to be, whatever you turn out to do, I have no doubt it will be something wonderful, and I am so very proud of you._

_I hope this journal will be useful, whether you choose to write in it or not._

_My Love,_

_Mom_

_(P.S. Please act responsible around the liquor cabinet. I am not so cruel a mother to subject you to a future free of the wonders of booze, but don’t go making my mistakes.)_

The letter stretches only a page and a half. Her grocery list is longer. It isn’t exactly dripping with emotion either with its cold clinical tone. It is not at all what you would have expected her to say.

 A tear hits the page. Then another. You hold the journal to your chest and let out a few wheezes. Fefeta curls around you fretfully, but you barely notice.

 You see another version of your mother plainly in your mind. A woman chewing on the edge of her pen, fearfully staring at a blank page. She knows the time she has left can be counted in minutes. She knows that somewhere out there, there will be a baby of hers who will grow up with only a handful of human companions, alone in a desolated world. She sits there wondering what her child will think of her, if she will ever understand truly why her mother will be nothing to her but photographs, books, and garbled chunks of audio and video. She’s known so many in her life, but the one person she wishes to know most is alien to her.

 You see it in the slight quiver of the G in _darling_ , in the slow shaky hesitation of the word _love_.

 You cry and hold the journal for a long time.

 You can feel it, Rose’s presence exuding from within you, and it isn’t a looming shadow, or the scattered fragments of a portrait. It’s a deep emanating light that is so intrinsic to your being; you wonder how you ever forgot it was there.

 

**The End**


End file.
